Culture: The Cult of English

I've heard that children can come here and learn english
with Uncle Maidanglou (Ronald MacDonald). Is that true?

Her:

Yes, it's usually 6pm on Thursday. But we're not running
the class at the moment because we don't have a foreign teacher.
Would you like to take the job?

Todd:

No.

Her:

Do you have any friends who might be interested?

Todd:

Er, I'll ask them. Goodbye.

In China, learning english has become almost a religion. Undoubtedly,
as China's contact with other countries grows (especially in the areas
of business and trade), so too will its dependence on english as a
language of commerce. But to me, faith in english seems to have
surpassed the reality of what it can offer to its disciples.

On the other hand, opportunities for social advancement here are so
slim (when divided by 1.3 billion) that the effort spent on studying
english might be justified even if only a small percentage will ever
need to use the language. And what are these coveted
opportunities that learning english can prepare you for? The main
ones are studying overseas, or working in a foreign company in China.
Most people I've spoken to agree that a Western university degree is
valuable. This could also be the first step towards migrating
permanently overseas, although certainly not all chinese consider this
desirable. Landing a job at a foreign company in China usually offers
better pay, more perks, and a better working environment than any
other job outside the civil service.

Even if you miss out on these opportunities, english skills are
thought to be valued by chinese employers too, presumably because they
either do business with foreign companies, or have aspirations of one
day doing so. Or maybe it just looks good on your resume. Of course,
there are other valid reasons for learning the language, such as access
to information in your field that is written in english. But to tell
truth, after 6 months in China I don't recall anybody ever mentioning
this reason. Finding a good job is the number one anxiety hanging
over the heads of most students.

On top of all this, english is a compulsory component of the national
tertiary entrance examination, along with chinese and mathematics
(except in a few cities where Japanese or Russian take the place of
english). Under all these pressures (extrinsic motivation),
you might wonder if anybody in China can actually enjoy learning
english (intrinsic motivation). I'm glad to report that some
do, and some also appreciate the study of english as a chance to learn
about other cultures.

Studying english in China generally involves a lot of rote learning,
but interest and fun aren't entirely ignored. For example, there are
a whole range of glossy magazines available (with names like
English Salon, or New Oriental English) which aim to
provide interesting, authentic material. However, the format is
inevitably much like what students are used to in their textbooks.
Each article is more like an intensive reading lesson, with emphasis
on language points and new words.

The amount of material published in China for students of english is
massive. In the educational section of any bookshop, english is bound
to take up half of the shelf space. Most of those titles will be
textbooks with the "intensive reading" format I just described. Even
oral english textbooks have this format, except that they present
dialogues rather than passages! I think it's clear that the concern
these publishers have for the youth of China is sometimes focused more
on the contents of their wallets, than the contents of their minds,
because quality varies considerably: sometimes not even the title of
the book would pass the scrutiny a native speaker. Having something
of a sweet tooth, I couldn't resist buying one thin volume entitled
A Chocolish Program (that's "chocolate english"). Lesson one
is the letters of the alphabet. Lesson two is a list of english words
borrowed into chinese (qiaokeli for chocolate, kaola for
koala, etc). Several of the other lessons are motivational articles
by the book's compiler (an english teacher called Bai Xiaoqi),
and lesson sixteen is a simplified excerpt from Genesis followed
by this joke about the
creation of man!

That's market economics for you. If people are willing to pay for it,
then there will be somebody willing to supply it. What an odd
coincidence that in the West the demand for herbal medicine and
chinese horoscopes has grown, while here the path to enlightenment is
english.

And according to chinese parents, the earlier you set out on that path
the better. With China's competitive education system, children are
accustomed to studying harder and from an earlier age than in my
country, and it seems that english is the ultimate example. Mothers
are brushing up on english in order to coach their children, while
those who can afford it hire tutors for children who are still in
primary school, sometimes even grade one! In the classroom, english
teaching begins at kindergarten, and the best kindergartens advertise
that they have foreign teachers (something that not even all high
schools can manage).

There's a DVD aimed at teaching english to young children which is
quite well-known in China, and features music and animation. If you
haven't already guessed, it's an offshoot from the popularity of
karaoke in this country. Mainly, it just teaches isolated words. For
example, in the section on food you would see a picture of an apple
(pingguo in chinese) and hear: "Pingguo, pingguo,
apple. Apple, apple, apple." I was exposed to this while a
three-year-old kid was being forced to watch it by his parents. But
despite its popularity, even the simple language of this DVD contains
both spelling and pronunciation errors. We see a picture of a pear,
but we hear: "Li, li,, peer. Peer, peer, peer."

If english is a religion, then its deities are native speakers. If I
meet a parent with a child, that parent will usually encourage their
child to speak some english to me. One university student told me
about the time she visited her aunt in Beijing, and her aunt took her
to a nearby school with the sole purpose of pouncing on foreigners as
they came out of the door. But the poor girl was too embarrassed to
say much at all. As for the learning english at MacDonalds, it's hard
to imagine that anything a native speaker could teach children of that
age couldn't be taught equally well by a chinese high school graduate
with better-than-average pronunciation. Unless the foreigner can
speak chinese, it will probably fall to Uncle Maidanglou to
lead the class, while the native speaker simply provides a model for
pronunciation. In this case, the foreign teacher is little more than
a gimmick (from a marketing perspective), or a magical talisman
emitting native speaker radiation to these young devotees kneeling
at the altar of english education.

The fact that chinese students will pay big bucks to attend one of Li
Yang's
Crazy English seminars proves only that China is english crazy.

Acknowledgements

Thankyou to Tie Cheng and Jackie for patiently answering my questions
about this topic.

Hi Todd, what a well-researched/well-researched post.

It's all true. I've seen that Crazy English guy all over the south, I haven't heard him speak though. Apparently, his English is self-taught..I wonder how good he really is...